Question

Just starting out with OOP in PHP and in general. From what I have been reading so far the two seem to be synonyms. Is this the case, and if not, practically speaking when people refer to objects and classes do they generally use the terms interchangeably?

Answer 1

Typically one would refer to an object as an instance of a class.

So you have some class Employee.

class Employee { 
   var $name; 
   function get_name ( ) { return $this->name; } 
   function set_name ($new_name) { $this->name = $new_name; } 
 }

And you declare an instance of it like:

$assistant = new Employee();

Employee is a class. $assistant is an object, that is an instance of the Employee class.

So to answer your question – a class is not an object. You create an object when you instantiate a class.